*
When she leaves the hotel at the end of her shift it is nearly dark outside, the western sky over the park still just streaked with wet blue light—she sees it through the trees—as it was on the afternoon that she first spoke to Fraser, over four years ago. She walks quickly to the tube station. When she saw him on Sunday he did not look well. He looked surprisingly old and paunchy. He looked out of shape. Having exchanged a few words with Summer, he stood there waiting, staring at the floor, while she finished her phone call—she was trying to hide the fact that her heart was palpitating from him and also from James on the other end of the line. When she had finished with James she snapped her phone shut and said, ‘Hello.’
‘Hello,’ he said.
She stood up. ‘Do you want to get a drink then?’
‘Okay.’ He shrugged, seemed unenthusiastic.
‘That’s what you said you wanted,’ she said. ‘You said you wanted to have a drink.’ That was what he had said. He smiled—the smile wasn’t quite there. ‘Sure. Let’s do that.’
Watching her put on her coat, he said, ‘You look nice.’
She ignored that—though her heart seemed to hit a pothole—and they left (she shouted up to Summer that she wouldn’t be long) and walked in silence to the Old Queen’s Head, where they often used to go for quiet drinks on Sunday nights…
She stands on a fully freighted escalator at King’s Cross, one of thousands of people in motion, tens of thousands. The formiche di Londra, Carlo calls them. And one of the formiche, lost in her thoughts, she transfers from the Piccadilly line to the Northern for the single stop to Angel.
The flat is empty and unlit. Summer is out. She will probably not be home tonight.
She has a long bath, and opens a pack of supermarket tortellini, and phones her mother and tells her that she has seen Fraser and wishes she hadn’t. Then, in her turquoise kimono, with her hair in a towel, she watches television for an hour.
Lying in bed, she opens the poetry anthology that lives on the night-table and, as she sometimes does last thing at night, takes the first poem she sees. She is pleased that tonight it is a short one.
Ah! Sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done;
Where the youth pined away with desire,
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves and aspire;
Where my sunflower wishes to go.
She switches off the light. When she is half-asleep, however, she hears her phone, muffled somewhere in the flat. She does not move. Sleepily she wonders whether it is James, or Fraser, or someone else.
2
Simon Miller wakes at four. Though it will not be light for more than two hours, he has things to see to. Leaving Mrs Miller to sleep in—she were a lazy so-and-so—he pulls on his jeans and prowls downstairs. In the kitchen he switches on the overhead light and, still squinting painfully, sets matchflame to Marlboro Red. Then he starts to make his tea. He has five runners entered at Fontwell Park this afternoon, a large number for a small stable like his—he has had to hire an extra horse transport—and there are preparations to see to. He opens the yard door and standing shirtless under the lintel puts on the floodlight. Floodlight were right. The fockin yard is under water. With filthy weather like this down in Sussex, it’s a short odds-on shot, he thinks, that Fontwell will be off. He’ll still have to pay for the horse transport. He’ll still have to see to all the paperwork that sending five horses to the track involves. There’s an inspection scheduled for later, until then he just has to assume the fockin thing is on.
When the light struggles up the rain has stopped and the old farmhouse looks sullen in its hollow. The stand of nettles shivers in the wind. In the tackroom the neon lights are on. The lads and lasses are up and taking out the string.
‘What you reckon, Piers?’ Simon says, sunk up to his ankles in the ooze of the yard mud, so that his thick legs seem to thrust from it like young trees. ‘Will it be on? What do you think?’
And patient, pale Piers does think—he thinks as if he is trying to work it out, as if it was possible to work it out logically. From his vantage point in the high saddle—he is on Mr President, smoking a cigarette while he waits for the others—he looks up at the laden sky. He looks at the flat ploughed fields. ‘Don’t know,’ he says finally.
‘Yeah.’ Simon nods. ‘That’s what I thought.’
‘There’s talk,’ Piers says, still with his eyes focused somewhere near the horizon, ‘about a heavy-ground Festival.’
‘I heard that. I heard that.’
‘What with all this rain.’
‘That’s right.’
The others are filing out into the twilit yard. Among the workriders are several of Simon’s offspring, and Piers’s son is on Absent Oelemberg, her profile looking like a shadow or silhouette in the frigid half-light. Warren Andrews, the stable jockey, is next, slouched over the withers of his mount. Handsome despite the slaloming nose, Indestructible Warren is the veteran of very many nasty falls. Snapped legs, smashed arms, pierced spleen, punctured lung—he knew what it meant to be mashed into hospital fodder by a storm of pummelling hooves. He is a famished, saturnine figure first thing in the morning. He struggles increasingly with his weight, and needing to do ten stone ten at Fontwell today, he spent most of yesterday in the makeshift sauna he has (an oil-drum filled with stones in his shed), eating nothing except a few Ryvita.
Simon smiles at one of the lasses, a plump teenager in jodhpurs on Mistress Of Arts—Kelly, the daughter of the local farmer from whom he rents this land. In spite of being the fattest workrider, she is the only one who wears jodhpurs. Them, and posh boots, and a purple velvet helmet. Proper little madam, Simon thought, when she first walked into the yard. ‘Alright, Piers,’ he says, and the head lad moves his mount into a walk and leads the slopping string down the lane. When they have left, Simon heaves himself into the old Land Rover, into its comfortless smells of cold oil and suffering canvas, and follows them to the new all-weather gallop—you need them nowadays—on the other side of the swollen stream.
*
It is eight when he steps into the hot kitchen. Mrs Miller has made his fry-up—the plate is waiting in the Aga—and the Racing Post has arrived. When he has eaten, he takes the paper and two Marlboros to the lavatory.
He is still in there twenty-five minutes later when James phones. ‘Oh, she’s fine,’ he says, when James asks after Absent Oelemberg. ‘Fit as a flea, she is.’
‘She is fit this time?’
‘She is.’
‘So…’ James says. ‘If she’s fit… How will you stop her winning?’
‘You don’t need to worry about that,’ Miller says, smearing out the second Marlboro in an ashtray stuck on the toilet-roll holder.
‘She’s not going to win then?’
A short silence. ‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’